Leading high-performance engineering teams

As leaders in engineering, we are ultimately responsible for the quality of our product, the most important factor for user happiness and business success. Although feature deliverables are a regular focus, the complexity of modern software means that small performance deficiencies can lead to substantially larger impacts. This reality required my teams to persist through architectural endeavors, and the tightest scrutiny I experienced on my teams was often in team culture.

Leading a group of highly skilled and intellectual engineers requires more than just engineering competence; it also means guiding systems and people to be flexible. If you are leading a large organization or gearing up to lead for the first time, scaling these behaviors is a challenge I vividly remember.

I have managed connected engineers building (time-critical) financial systems, and with our systems, if we had an issue for more than 30 minutes, where even brief downtime could have serious consequences. I want to share something important (while keeping the underlying meaning unchanged) that you should find useful wherever your software’s stability and performance is essential. This article presents ideas in four categories – focusing on a reliability culture, the deploy trade-off, resilient teams, and sustaining progress.